I have had a long relationship with using Windows and Linux. First off, many years ago, Ubuntu. Before Snaps. It worked well, but compatibility with stuff is very limited. Good for a web browser PC, not good for the daily.

Lubuntu was my go to for a long time, LXDE was a very light desktop and the whole desktop would take 150-300MB of RAM, where Windows took 2-3GB, and even Ubuntu took 600-800 MB (which was a lot ten years ago).

I’d tried many distros - Slackware, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, even used Manjaro for a few months, but at the time, the same problems were always present - limited support for anything. Nobody had working GPU drivers in the kernel - all were fb basic drivers that didn’t give you much if any hardware acceleration. Nvidia was proprietary. ATi was proprietary. Their drivers required specific kernels, and would break on anything else. Ditto Intel. Wireless drivers were almost nonexistent. Laptop power management was nonexistent. X Window System is a spaghetti monster.

I’d wanted to Linux for a long time, but these road blockers have always been a problem, and thus I kept running Windows, optimizing it to the 11’s to keep it running smooth.

Enter Valve.

Their real attempt to run games on Linux via Steam Deck, and all the supporting work they did to make that happen smoothly was a game changer. Now, AMD has an open source gpu driver built into the kernel, so does Intel. Nvidia also, but their open source driver needs to cook before it’s actually useful. KDE has a good desktop environment ecosystem now. Proton lets you run almost any game in Linux at native performance.

Early this year, I went all in on Fedora when PCVR Streaming became a working thing. Now we have flatpaks to eliminate the distro release problem. Now we have good drivers - so good wireless pcvr works better in Linux than in Windows on the same system. Linux kernel even has seen a huge upgrade in performance and reliability in part due to this shift, and especially the valve programmers that have made even the old amd graphics drivers work more reliably.

The big difference is, where Windows 11 takes 5-9 GB RAM at the desktop, a similar setup in Fedora (startup apps and stuff) takes 1-3. That’s a big memory budget savings if you’re pinched for RAM.

Now why Fedora KDE and not Arch, CachyOS, or another focused distro? Fedora combines the traditional setup with flatpaks, and they do put effort into making sure updates don’t set your PC on fire. Normal people can use it. It has all the features you’re looking for in regard to general use.

I make music and my music plugin library doesn’t like Linux. Also professional visual creative programs are not ported yet, and I don’t wanna use gimp etc.

I’m ready, but for creatives, it doesn’t seem to be there yet.

Maybe I shouldn’t be answering in this because I do use Linux. But there was certainly times where I tried and went back. Here’s a novel.

I tried Backtrack 5, Monjaro, Arch, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, some other things I’m forgetting… over the years and none of them could really stick with me.

My problems were mostly self-inflicted, plus a lot of game and social incompatibilities. The game issues are basically non-existent for me now, but I never played the huge multiplayer, kernel anti-cheat titles, which are where most people still get stuck today.

The other half of the issue was maintenance and updating, particularly on rolling releases. I would just get fucked by bad timing and user error of not reading the forums first. Particularly with arch, either update too fast, or update too slow, and things get out of sync and borked. I also just didn’t like there are tons of little tweaks that I did all over a system to customize it that mostly gets wiped out between versions or between distros; little workarounds for issues that were temporary, and I always forget what I changed and where or why. Re-installing and starting from scratch was pretty common for me.

Ultimately, I kept using Windows 10 until EOL or very close to it anyways. I was the kind of person who would do a crap ton of registry tweaking, micro-managing of services and group policy, and hand-curate PATH. I found that winget and WSL kind of offered me the best of both worlds for a time. I was the kind of power user who had uses for the Administrator account; so I just sticked with what I knew and what was working. But I really didn’t want to go to Windows 11… Windows 10 had been getting worse and worse over time.

But, then I discovered NixOS which kind of solved all my major gripes about traditional Linux, while also offering valuable features that didn’t exist (at least to my knowledge at the time) on any other windows or Linux system.

Regular Linux distros were always just kind of “like windows but with more rough edges” with very little to no tangible benefits to me. The main pitch I got for Linux was one of FOSS and ethical software. Controversy aside: the Stallman angle was always a lawful good “they don’t respect the user, so I won’t use it.” My take was a bit more chaotic neutral with piracy and cracking; “if they don’t respect users then I don’t need to respect their software either lol” so Linux didn’t really offer enough value to justify switching and all the effort that entailed, when I could just beat windows into submission instead.

NixOS changed that equation. Instead of just “being windows but slightly worse,” it offered major feature and quality of life improvements that I really valued as a user and that I could take advantage of as a programmer. It gave me an island of stability and the confidence that I could spend a lot of time learning and tinkering and none of it would really go to waste. I saw it as “the last operating system I’ll ever need” which gave me the motivation to dive deep on it, which also increased my transferable/generalized Linux skills.

I still have issues occasionally, but honestly, it’s not really more frequent than it was with Windows, and at least on Linux I feel like I’m fighting the problem whereas with Windows it felt like I was just fighting Windows.

Nix just happens to synergize very well whatever flavors of autism and ADHD I have, and made Linux infinitely more approachable, while also offering value that made me want to approach it.

The only way I would use windows is if I was paid. Linux can be a hassle but after using windows recently goddamn that shit sucks I fucking hate it, bloat, ads everywhere, laggy AF, not customisable at all, file manager that doesn’t work… a little hassle is a small price to pay

I’m surprised those people exist

I didn’t always want to have to fix 2-3 things just so I can do 1 thing. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Windows, but things just work and I rarely have issues.

I didn’t exactly left, I still have Linux on laptops and whatnot. I’ve tried switching my main PC to Linux twice now, and both times I eventually ended up going back to Windows.

The thing is, and I know some peeps disagree with this, Linux is great if you enjoy tinkering and customizing things. I love doing that, and I even enjoy the troubleshooting part, BUT only when I have the time and energy for it.

But sometimes I just need to be able to jump on a Teams call and have my audio, mic, camera, and screen sharing all work immediately without any hassle. That’s just not the reality on Linux desktop yet. Ofc it’s possible to get all those things working on Linux, but it just isn’t the same It just works! experience you get on Windows.

I was on & off with Linux for decades. It was usually some minor problem that would take a weekend to fix, often driver or audio-video related. And GRUB errors were an early end to many experiments.

But about 3 years ago, Windows started crashing and I couldn’t figure it out. After much troubleshooting, I finally installed Linux Mint and have had no real problems.

I’d also say AI, used with caution to troubleshoot, is a better tool than google search by a country mile.

After literally 5 or 6 hours of trying to get it to install, I was only on it for about an hour before I somehow borked it. Rather than spending even more time trying to unbork it, I just went back to my Windows disk image and carried on where I left off.

I want to switch, it sings to my autism like a fat-titted siren, but it’s still too arcane and way too sensitive to different hardware combinations. Windows, for all its faults, rarely gives me trouble simply running. I don’t need to research specific driver versions or avoid buying certain brands of GPU. I don’t need to edit the bootloader using a third-party pre-boot program just to get the OS to load beyond the logo (I had to do this on my last attempt to switch to Linux, and it was something I read on a random blog on page 3 of the search results, it wasn’t mentioned in the official documentation).

I don’t mind learning new things, it’s one of the things that excites me about switching to Linux, but the learning needs to be pleasant and easily-accessible. If I have to spend hours searching for a dude with a personal blog who guides me through editing systems files just so I can get to the desktop, something has gone awry. If the OS can work out-of-the-box with no h4x0r fiddling needed from me, then we can talk. Until then, I just don’t have enough will to live to spend on it.

Dunno. I’m using Linux on my laptop and it just works out of the box. 🤷
I think the integrated microphone making an annoying sound all the time might not have been a problem on Windows? But I don’t know. I’ve got headphones with a microphone anyway, and that works better than an integrated microphone anyway, so I haven’t bothered thinking more about it. But that’s the only problem that comes to my mind.

I ran Linux on my main machine back in 2010-2012, it was for the most part fine, but I missed put on a lot of great games, neither I nor Linux was ready for gaming on Linux at the time.

Then I was given an old workstation from my dad’s office, it ran Windows, and I bought a terrible GPU for it, I then played Bioshock and later Half-Life 2 for the first time, and got hooked back on Windows and gaming.

I am currently planning on migrating to Linux when I build a new computer, but I can’t migrate before I have completed my NAS (just need two 8TB HDDs to complete it, it has been on hold for more than a year…

Once that is is done I can migrate my stuff onto a 32TB Zraid2 and things will be far easier.

used both for many years. after windows 11 telematics and the rise of proton/vulkan i finally made the full %100 switch last year. Part of an effort to completely remove FAAMG from my life. Also, for me at least there’s nothing like the feeling of solving your own issue and having the machine working as well or better than windows. Windows crashes all the time as well. remember the Blue-Screen Of Death? I had one laptop for years on windows that required dongles for bluetooth only to discover it had a latent bluetooth adapter AFTER i switched over to linux that was not even listed in the manual or parts list.

Knowing your not sending everything you own to some server in redmond washington, fuck microsoft. its a way of living, not having to rely on some corporation for everything, instead i rely on GNU…

combined with airgap methods, redundancies, ad hoc solutions and robust piracy method, linux os is just one part of a clandestine operation.

also debian, linux MX rn

check out distrowatch

Set up gentoo while in college. Switched major to IT, but stayed on gentoo for about 5 years.

Got out of college and was dual booting windows for gaming. Eventually got a job in IT that was managing a large Windows environment with some non-windows infrastructure.

Realized that the world runs on windows. Eventually lost interest in figuring out why things (audio, video, wifi) would stop working and having no community with a similar setup as mine. Got tired of evaluating random config files that didn’t have any cohesion with ther OS. Additionally, I started using enterprise hardware which had even better windows support than consumer-grade.

Then there’s the app support. I have software for my vehicles or stereos that only runs on windows for example. At another time was a DJ and the best software was on Windows.

I still test distro out occasionally but it’s dumb shit that keeps me from using it as a general purpose OS. I’ve tried popos and mint and find it usable but had problems with gpu drivers.

At the end of the day though, I just need a browser, and a few apps that only run on windows. Why would I dual boot and maintain 2 OS’s when I’m perfectly capable of dealing with only 1?

I’ve been on debian13 for over a year. On a laptop. It’s fine.

Last time, I upgraded my graphics card, and X had a conniption. I was on mint or Ubuntu. Before that, no WiFi drivers on for a dell laptop, definitely Ubuntu.

Switched to linux during the windows Vista era.

Switched back because that was when Ubuntu started to shit the bed and because I went to school for CS and MS gave out free software like the top versions of windows and VS Studio, which we were expected to use and we all did(making collab easier.)